RE: Obamacare makes people less likely to exercise, more likely to smoke and drink

(06-12-2013 11:49 AM)Impulse Wrote: We need to model after countries that have national healthcare plans...

Question: Why does it to be a national plan? You're never going to get voters in Mississippi to agree to a single-payer system, so there will always be a compromise (like Obamacare) that makes BOTH sides unhappy. Why not have, say, a true Canadian-style single payer system in Massachusetts, where you have a largely liberal voting base likely to approve it, and let the folks in Mississippi do their own thing? Then you'll have control groups, and if life expectancy skyrockets in Mass, you can point to the health system and get other states to follow suit. And if life expectancy plummets in Miss, they'll be forced to fix it to stop people from leaving the state. If it's done nationwide, and it's a bad plan, it'll be impossible to fix it because, without a control group that uses a different system, there's no way to prove the plan is bad. Besides, at the national level, the system is so much bigger with so many bigger layers of bureaucracy that the costs go up. Countries that do it well, like those in Scandinavia, tend to push decision-making to the local level anyway.